The drive itself is not the issue. You can run Linux on a spinning drive and it will still be quick and snappy, because your free RAM will be used for caching file data. I don't know why Windows and Mac aren't doing this properly.
MacOS has virtual memory and caching/buffering (and compression)
The drive is the issue, linux just happens to a better job of using other resources to improve HDD performance. Said linux installation would still be much faster/more responsive on an SSD. For the prices that Apple charges for their computers they should include a low-tier SSD at the very least.
macOS also uses all your free memory for disk cache, and will even start swapping out idle processes if it thinks that more disk cache makes sense
I'm not sure that's accurate. I don't think it has much to do with caching strategies and everything to do with all developers now having SSDs and so never testing their software against slower media.
APFS is “optimized for SSD”, so performance is miserable on hard disks. For awhile Apple held off upgrading the system disk if it was an HDD, but that’s no longer an option if you want to run the latest OS.